Fernand
Braudel Center, Binghamton University
Abstracts
William G. Martin, “Global Movements before ‘Globalization’:
Black Movements as World-Historical Movements”
Current studies of globalization herald a new age
of global social movements. This
article argues by contrast that movements, and specifically Black movements,
have for at least several centuries operated globally as antisystemic
movements. A new wave of historiographical writing is drawn upon to argue that
Black international movements not only arose out of the world-scale, shared
experiences of slavery, colonialism, and racial oppression, but have served to
shape core crises and transitions of the capitalist world-economy. Three
examples are provided to suggest a new perspective and research agenda, namely
Black movement waves surrounding the Haitian revolution, anticolonial revolts,
and the long Black 1960’s.
Jeffrey
D. Howison, “‘Let Us Guide Our Own Destiny’: Rethinking the
History of the Black Star Line”
Although
the Black Star Line existed officially from 1919 to 1922 and sailed a limited
number of voyages around the Americas, its symbolic dimension exceeded the
spatial and temporal boundaries of the actual ships themselves. The ideological
significance of the Black Star Line was as great, if not greater, than the
actual economic dimension of the company in terms of accumulating capital. In
various instances, the Black Star Line appealed to people of African descent
struggling in the Americas and in Africa, although the physical ships never
crossed the Atlantic. The appeal of the Black Star Line during the 1920’s
reflects the increased cohesiveness of the Black world during this period.
Kelvin
Santiago-Valles, “World-Historical Ties Among ‘Spontaneous’ Slave Rebellions in the
Atlantic”
Most
slave revolts during the late-eighteenth to late-nineteenth centuries were not
usually organized in a globally-conscious manner, nor did they include
deliberate coordination across islands, continents, and oceans. For this
reason, much of the corresponding scholarship tends to conceptualize such
uprisings and corollary resistances as geographically isolated—locally,
regionally, and globally. This article proposes an alternative conceptual
framework by illustrating how all local uprisings and anti-slavery conspiracies
among captive populations did not have to be consciously linked across
different localities and regions in order to have a global and long-term impact
on the architecture and prospects of the colonial-capitalist world-system. The
analytical framework proposed in this article hopefully will contribute to the
broader project of identifying how hegemonic global structures were transformed
and partly undermined during this period. The goal is not only to illustrate
new ways in which Africa, the Americas, and Europe were interconnected, but
also to describe how Afro-diasporic resistances were linked to other subaltern
revolts and laboring-poor contestations across the planet.
Martin
O. West, “Global Africa: The Emergence and Evolution of
an Idea”
This
article offers some chronological contours of the global Africa idea—the idea
that Africans and people of African descent worldwide share common historical
experiences, notably slavery, colonialism, and racial oppression and that they
should, therefore, unite on the basis of these commonalities to effect their
mutual liberation. Temporally, the global Africa is divided into four periods:
the first from the 1770’s to 1900; the second from 1900 to 1945; the third from
1945 to 1963; and the fourth from 1963 to the present. The global Africa idea
emerged in the late-eighteenth century, in the era of abolitionism and of the
U.S., French, and Haitian revolutions, which events are collectively called the
quadripartite revolution. The global Africa idea, then, originated in the
African diaspora on the west bank of the Atlantic Ocean (the Americas and
western Europe), as opposed to the east bank of the Atlantic (Asia), or on the
African continent itself. In its second, third, and fourth moments, the global
Africa idea spread from its base on the west bank of the Atlantic to the
African continent and dispersed Black communities in Asia and the Pacific.
Hans
Ulrich Obrist, AScience and Art: A Conversation with Ilya Prigogine@
Hans Ulrich Obrist, curator of art at the Musée d=Art
Moderne de la Ville de Paris interviews the late Ilya Prigogine, Nobel Prize in Chemistry.
Prigogine restates his belief in the centrality of the arrow of time in the
explanation of physical reality, and explains why he came to work on
non-equilibrium and bifurcations. He also explains the relation of his
scientific views to the philosophy of Henri Bergson, He proceeds to discuss
the universe as the creation of possibilities and shows the relation of this
concept to art. He speaks of his own collection of pre-Columbian sculpture as
an inspiration for his scientific work. He explains how he has sought to
suppress the supposed contradiction between science and art. He then discusses
the role of human groups in creativity and the limitations of Eurocentrism. He
says of the future of science that it must become more conscious of social
problems and base itself on the end of certainties. Asked what in his own life
at 80 he did not complete, Prigogine says that he did not become a good
pianist.
Isabelle Stengers, AEvents and Histories of Knowledge@
What
does an event mean in the history of thought? This article starts with the Galilean
event as it can be identified with the birth of modern physics and then
compares the scope, challenge, and risk of two subsequent twentieth-century
events both of which can be associated with a contestation of what was born
together with modern physics: the reference to nature as ruled by objective
laws. One is a philosophical event, that is, Alfred North Whitehead's
speculative attempt to escape the resulting bifurcation of nature. The other
belongs to physics B it is Ilya
Prigogine's attempt to generalize classical and quantum laws into a broken time symmetry description. In both
cases, coherence is the primordial value, but the difference between the two
attempts shows that such a value cannot be considered in abstraction from the
paths of philosophy and modern physics as they diverged since Galileo.
Roberto Fernández Retamar, AConocimiento, teoría y
tensión entre conocimiento local y universal@
The concept of universal
often means in practice the views and norms of the developed North, which fails
to take into account the perspectives of the South. The article discusses ways
towards achieving a true universalism via a new kind of university and a
"new international."
Carlos A. Aguirre Rojas, AHegemonic Cultures and
Subaltern Cultures: Between Dialogue and Conflict@
This
article reconstructs the complicated relationship between hegemonic cultures
and subaltern cultures, showing their articulation and movements in a kind of a
complex circle, but at the same time their permanent opposition and struggle.
The article also tries to demonstrate
how popular or subaltern culture is the final source of any possible cultural
construction. To this objective, the article examines Carlo Ginzburg=s
The Cheese and the Worms, along with the elements of Bajtin, Thompson,
Bloch, and Davis used by Ginzburg.
Franco
Moretti, AWorld-Systems Analysis,
Evolutionary Theory, Weltliteratur
The notion of Aworld literature,@ coined by Goethe in the
early nineteenth century, has not yet received the full theoretical development
that it deserves. In this article, I look for a possible solution in two
theories originally developed outside the literary field: evolution and
world-system analysis. I begin by describing their appeal for literary history;
then, I discuss their conceptual (in-)compatibility; and finally, outline the
new image of Weltliteratur that emerges from their encounter.
Massimo
De Angelis, AThe Political Economy of
Global Neoliberal Governance@
In this article I discuss the relation between the
emergent discourse of Agovernance,@ neoliberal policies, and the process of
capitalist globalization. In particular I explore what can be called the
critical Apolitical economy@ of governance,
which to me implies, broadly speaking, investigating three types of
complementary linkages: the link between governance and capital=s
problematic of accumulation; the link between governance and social conflict,
i.e., the problematic of social stability for accumulation; the link
between governance and discourse, or governance as discourse to manage and
promote that social stability which is fundamental for capital=s
accumulation. These three dimensions lead to two underpinning questions. First,
how is governance located in relation to neoliberal policies that have emerged
and developed in the last quarter of a century? Secondly, how is the
problematic of governance related to the phenomenon of Aglobalization@,
i.e., of accumulation of capital in the neoliberal period?
Samir
Amin, AChina, Market Socialism, and
U. S. Hegemony@
For the past two decades China has chosen a path
called "market socialism." The author considers that this choice
could be an efficient stage on the long road to developed socialism as long as
public property continues to prevail and peasants have guaranteed access to
land. Failing to ensure these conditions, the pattern of national capitalism
which would become the real substance of the project will hardly be sustainable
and moreover would have to face devastating hostility from the U.S. attempt to
perpetuate its hegemony.
Ismael Saz, AWas
there Francoism in Spain? Impertinent Reflections on the Historic Place of the
Dictatorship@
The Francoist dictatoship in Spain was considered by most analysts during its existence and for a period after Franco's death as a Fascist regime. This article treats the successive ways in which this description has since been called into doubt by subsequent analysts - initially by Juan Linz, but then in different ways by many others. The article traces the historiographical and political implications of the multiple alternative descriptions by analysts of many different persuasions. He insists that the appropriate concept is to consider the Francoist regime as a right wing military dictatorship with Catholic overtones, and to understand the regime as part and parcel of the continuing history of Spain and not as an aberrant interlude. It was rather the conscious product of a series of right wing political and social actors who found in Spanish nationalism the best response possible to the challenges of modern society - those related to political democracy, social equality, and national plurality.
Vitorino Magalhães Godinho, "Portugal and the Making of the Atlantic World: Sugar Fleets and Gold Fleets, the Seventeenth to the Eighteenth Centuries"
In
this classic article, Vitorino Magalhães Godinho emphasizes the Atlantic rather
than the Mediterranean origins of Atlantic history. He reconstructs the
geographical, material, and economic interdependencies creating the Atlantic as
an integrated historical space. Through careful analysis of specific routes,
complexes of commodities, and interstate relations he establishes the
“structural dynamic of the Atlantic economy.” By identifying the shift from a
cycle of sugar, tobacco, and salt to a cycle of gold, port, and Madeira wine he
is able both to delineate the changing composition and character of the
Atlantic economy and to establish the specific temporal rhythms of its
development. His focus is Portugal, but by treating Portugal as a specific node
within this Atlantic complex he is able to analyze the processes creating
hierarchical relations among states in the interstate system.
Rui
Santos, "With a Mind to Science: Theoretical Underpinnings of Vitorino
Magalhães Godinho’s Historical Work"
The
pivotal role of the formation of a critical and scientific mentality, akin to
free and responsible citizenship, in building the modern world, and as its
reverse the tragic failure of the Portuguese to carry their discoverers' role
into full-fledged modernity, is an often neglected dimension in the accounts of
Magalhães Godinho's view of the discoverers' world-building process. Such a way
of posing the historical and macrosocial problem is not dissociable from the
scientific formation of the historian's mind, any more than it is from the
political circumstances of his civic life. This article aims to shed light on
formation of that scientific mind by looking into some of its less patent
theoretical underpinnings, often not explicit in Magalhães Godinho's more
widely known writings.
Dale
Tomich, “Vitorino Magalhães Godinho: Atlantic History, World History”
This article reconstructs the biographical, intellectual, and political contexts of Vitorino Magalhães Godinho’s classic “Portugal and the Making of the Atlantic World: Sugar Fleets and Gold Fleets, the Seventeenth to the Eighteenth Centuries.” Godinho’s political approach to the history of the Discoveries and maritime expansion demonstrates a broad concern for economic and social history and the history of culture. He sought to contribute to a vigorous and democratic public life by providing a basis for Portuguese identity that went beyond Salazar’s fascist ideology. Godinho actively participated in the postwar Annales, and in France enjoyed close contact with Lucien Febvre and Fernand Braudel. Godinho's work expresses the substantive and methodological concerns and innovations that characterized the transition to the “second Annales.” His complex and sophisticated reconstruction of the “structural dynamic of the Atlantic economy” reveals a sophisticated theoretical approach to world historical change that still retains its relevance and vitality today.
Immanuel
Wallerstein, “The Discovery of the World-Economy”
Os
descobrimentos refers not only to the discovery of far away lands by the Portuguese or
even by Europeans. It was also the discovery of a new social construct, that of
the capitalist world-economy. The discovery of this new social construct was
the work of a group of researchers, who were writing in the mid-twentieth
century. Among these transformatory works was that of Vitorino Magalhães Godinho.
His "total history" centered on three themes: history has become
geographical; history is about an activity which is multidimensional but
singular; the past becomes relativized in the present. But what does total
history mean in practice? There are four debates that need to be resolved. The
first is the question of the unit of analysis. The second debate is about how
to conceive it theoretically—systematically and/or historically. The third
debate concerns what to do about the compartmentalization of reality into
the economic, the political, and the sociocultural. And finally there is the
debate about the two cultures. These four debates could clear the way for the
construction of a historicized social science. And for this we must thank
Vitorino Magalhães Godinho, not him alone to be sure, but as one of the
pioneers.
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